


mesmerized by mythology

by peculiar_mademoiselle



Category: The Beatles (Band)
Genre: Character Study, F/M, Feminist Themes, Feuds, Inspired by Real Events, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-13
Updated: 2021-01-13
Packaged: 2021-03-17 13:47:46
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,399
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28726095
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/peculiar_mademoiselle/pseuds/peculiar_mademoiselle
Summary: Paul McCartney reflects on Yoko Ono, across the years.It's definitely complicated.
Relationships: (IMPLIED), John Lennon/Paul McCartney, John Lennon/Yoko Ono, Paul McCartney & Yoko Ono
Comments: 5
Kudos: 12





	mesmerized by mythology

**Author's Note:**

> Hiiiiiii, while lots of this is inspired by real events/interviews/articles, it is of course fiction. I have no special insight into this relationship - I just think it's fascinating. 
> 
> Enjoy!

**I**

Paul didn't really remember when he first met Yoko Ono. She just appeared in their social circle, in a puff of smoke. 

She’d done some weird art thing with the lions in Trafalgar apparently, and Michael White seemed to think that she was, well _not_ the next big thing. But _a_ thing. Then she’d blithely asked him for song sheets, but without any sort of reverence, requesting them the way one might request a cinema’s poster of a film that was no longer showing. It was infuriating, the fact that she wanted to stick something so rare and special in a scrapbook for a gift. And the fact that though she made the request behind big round sunglasses, he reckoned she wouldn’t be able to pick him out of a line up if she tried. 

John brought her by during the recording of The Fool on The Hill and in retrospect, he regretted not observing her properly. At the time it had just seemed like typical John behaviour, though he was inclined to deny it _‘want to come up and see my etchings?’_ was his default pick up line, most girls easily wowed by a glance at the hallowed creative process and a bonk in the back of John’s scribbled all over car. But Yoko wasn’t most girls. Paul wished he’d watched her more closely, because she was certainly watching them.

**II**

In the mid 70s his opinion of her changed again. He’d expected her to fall apart when John left, but she’d stayed remarkably together. They didn’t share many friends, but she was still very much in his peripheral. Every time he heard about her, she was hanging out with Warhol, or releasing yet another album. She’d even nicked some of his session musicians, and now, according to industry whispers, had a better session band then she and John had ever had. He still thought her music was dross, and there was no way he was actually going to _listen_ to her new record. But he’d seen a copy of it, her irritatingly blank face pasted atop the Sphinx’s. How very Yoko. 

Instead, it was John who’d fallen to bits. It was Hamburg all over again, but the shit you pull in your early 20s quickly ripens from funny to concerning when you’re pushing 35. To most people it probably looked like he was having a whale of a time, Dr Winston O’Boogie, the life and soul. To Paul he seemed...unmoored. A ship without an anchor, whirling wildly in a storm. If John needed one thing in this world it was a home. Mimi had provided one, for a while. But John was always searching, yearning. Longing for a place he had no memory of, perhaps had never known. 

In Paris John had whispered, in the darkness of the room, that once he’d thought home was having his head pressed against Julia’s breast. Then he’d reached out, hungry and desperate, encircling Paul’s wrist in a grip that burned. Paul had stroked those long fingers gently with his other hand, and then prised them off. The skin beneath John's hands had turned red and blotchy, threatening to bruise. Paul was very happy with his life now, and wouldn’t trade it for anything, but sometimes he couldn’t help but dwell on what might have been, if he’d opened that particular door, and let John make his heart a hearth. 

The notion lingered above him like a cloud ( _look for me in the sky..._ ) even as he picked up the phone to call Yoko, to ask her to let John come home.

**III**

After John’s death, he still couldn’t put a name to what he felt for her, other than respect. Sometimes she was as soft as a petal, and sometimes she was colder than ice. She was as intentionally funny as she was unintentionally laughable. And he couldn’t decide whether she was incredibly obtuse or smarter than them all. It was like trying to grab at and hold the smoke rising from the cig she always had lit in their rare business meetings. 

But as with all things Beatle related, it was hard to know how much to take personally, paperwork choked them all, the way ivy chokes a tree, and friendships were difficult to maintain when everybody was lawyered up to their eyeballs. Even conversing with George felt stressful, and dangerous, in a way that made his heart ache. He thought about teasing him on the bus, gushing about a record, laughing about a bird. Now they were walking on thin ice.

Still, he invited Yoko and Sean to his home in 1995, and in a twisted Brady Bunch re-run of Two Virgins, they and the children recorded a song of Yoko’s. With her cropped hair and rounded glasses, she was a tiny image of her late husband, giggling when she wasn’t wailing into the mic. It was difficult to swallow the lump in his throat at her breezy exhale of, "John, we’re here now, together.”

Then she called him Salieri. 

** IV**

Somehow, the world changed slowly and then all at once, in a way he didn’t even notice. Though his relationship with Yoko has always been tenuous, there’d never been much risk in belittling her. Getting up at an award show and calling her ‘not the brightest of buttons’? Well, it was a guaranteed laugh, a real crowd pleaser. Until it wasn’t. 

Suddenly, defence of her started falling from the sky and sprouting up from the ground. He was swimming in think-pieces about misogyny, about patriarchy, about racism. His PR alarm blared, out of nowhere Yoko was an _asset_ to her own cause. She could _win_ without John. She’d had to invoke him to keep Paul from changing the song-writing credits in the early noughties, but she might not need to again, she could go it alone. 

When she got her first dance number one, he’d actually laughed. It was mad what people could do with remixes, and it was a nice little novelty that all of John’s money that ended up poured into her musical endeavours might not have gone to waste. Then she got another, and another, and another.

Slowly but surely, the dust was blown off her old records, and people actually liked what they found. No, it wasn’t not comparable to the devotion shown by Oasis to the Beatles, but watching Yoko dance around a stage with Lady Gaga was a little hard to comprehend. 

Then he did Queenie Eye, and she did Bad Dancer, both of them wheeling out their celebrity pals to serve as back up. Yoko bopping between Beastie Boys in hot pants, despite her age, while he enlisted real A-Listers, like Johnny Depp and Meryl Streep. Surely he thought, he'd won this one. 

He bought the newspaper the next day, to find their videos dissected side by side - Yoko’s was _sophisticated_ , while his was _schmaltzy._ The paper ended up shoved in the bin before lunchtime. 

**V**

It was sad, when Yoko flagged. One minute she was bouncing around on stage, screaming her lungs out, and the next it seemed she could barely walk. When he saw her again, she looked tiny and doll-like, sharp pointy limbs folded over themselves in her wheelchair. The wheelchair being pushed by Sean, who all his life reminded Paul of his mother, but who at that moment with his long nose and fiery eyes (screaming ‘ _bad-mouth her, I fucking dare you_ ’) was every inch his father. 

When she spoke her words were broken and lispy, air whistling between false teeth, pauses intermittent as she struggled to connect her voice to her thoughts. She smiled though, when she spoke of John, and it seemed like somewhere along the way she’d dropped the porcelain mask she wore when talking about him, to hide her sorrow and her joy from a world that might scorn it. In a later interview her eyes gleamed with tears as she blurted, “I still miss him!”

For once, it didn’t even cross his mind to idly wonder who was _winning_ at that moment in time. The interview segued into a clip of John throwing his head back and laughing, and he realised that he and Yoko had been sharing a podium the whole time. They’d known John. They’d created with John. They’d loved John. 

Of course. They’d both already won.

**Author's Note:**

> The title is from Yoko's song Hell In Paradise. If you haven't listened to it yet, you should! It's a bop.
> 
> I am a fan of both Yoko and Paul, the way they're presented or thought about in the narration is not necessarily what I think or feel. (For one, I think Yoko's music is fab.)
> 
> Lots of this is pulled from real interviews, events and articles (yes, The Guardian newspaper really did negatively review Queenie Eye against Bad Dancer...the more you know!) and I'm happy to discuss any of them. Hit me up on Tumblr - dreaminyourvoice. 
> 
> Thank-you so much for reading and let me know what you thought in the comments. I do appreciate them. x


End file.
